Suddenly (24 page)
Authors: Barbara Delinsky
“I work, for one thing, and not nine to five. I’m on call many evenings and weekends, and I
like
my work. If someone were waiting for me at home, he’d be in for a long wait.”
“Maybe he’d have things to do himself. Maybe he wouldn’t mind.”
“Maybe not, but it’s a moot point, seeing as I haven’t fallen madly in love with anyone from Tucker.”
“What about me?”
“A, I’m not madly in love with you, and B, you’ll be gone in a year. You don’t count,” she finished with what she thought was a confident flourish, then caught a movement at the door. She looked that way to find Sara by the jamb and quickly crossed the room. “Hey, Sara. How’s it going out there?”
“The baby’s crying. Can I get her? I have a little brother at home. I know what to do.”
Paige took a quick breath. “Sure.” She watched Sara leave, then turned back to Noah, who was picking up a scattering of clothes from the closet floor. “I didn’t realize there was a child from the second marriage.” That complicated things even more.
“Are you washing these?” Noah asked darkly.
She shook her head. “Dry-cleaning. Put them on the bed.”
“But you have to sleep there.”
“Then the love seat.”
“I’ll put them in the car,” he said, and went to do it.
Facing two filled laundry baskets, Paige piled one on top of the other and carried them to the laundry room. She started the first load of wash, then went up the stairs.
Sara was learning against the bars of Sami’s crib, not touching, just looking. Paige crept to her side and whispered, “She fell back to sleep?”
“I guess.” She dropped a hand into the crib and touched kitty, who was curled in a ball. “Did he send you after me?”
“No. He’s outside putting things in my car.”
“You know, don’t you.”
Paige didn’t pretend ignorance. “That he’s your father? Uh-huh.” She didn’t believe in playing games with adolescent girls who were often smarter than she was. In Sara’s case, honesty was a must.
“Did he tell you not to trust me?”
“No. Why would he do that?”
“Because he doesn’t trust me himself. He knows I lie.”
“Well,” Paige said, unable to say one way or another what Noah knew, “I’ve never seen you lie.”
“You have.” She looked at Paige with quiet defiance. “There’s no baby back home. My mom had enough to handle with me. She wasn’t about to have a second.”
The hurt rang familiar to Paige. “Did she tell you that?”
Sara fingered kitty’s paw. “No, but I could tell. Everything was fine as long as I was invisible, but after a while that was harder to be.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t,” Sara scoffed.
“I do. My parents had me when they were nineteen. I was one major chain around their necks. They wanted to be flying all over the world, not staying home to raise a child.”
“But did they?”
“Stay home? For three reluctant years. Then they were gone.”
“So who took care of you?”
“My grandmother.”
“Was she happy about it?”
“Very. It gave her another shot at parenting. She felt she could do everything right the second time around.”
“Don’t say that’s what my dad’s feeling, because he didn’t do
anything
the first time around.”
“Maybe he sees that was a mistake. Maybe he’s trying to correct it.”
She didn’t answer. After a minute of fiddling with kitty’s ear, she nudged the animal closer to Sami. “Do you like him?”
“Your dad? Sure. He’s a nice guy.”
“I mean,
like
him,” she drawled.
Paige drawled back, “I don’t
know
him enough to say.”
“He looked right at home in your bedroom.”
“He was helping pick up. Giving moral support. It’s scary, this kind of thing,” she said, and looked around. “Whoever was here even went through the baby’s things. Why would he have done that?”
“I don’t know. Breaking and entering isn’t my thing. I just steal from stores.”
Paige sighed. She put an arm around Sara’s shoulders and said softly, “I’m glad you told me that. If you only steal from stores, then my parents’ silver is safe, and my grandmother’s Waterford, and the diamond earrings my father gave me when I turned sixteen.” She tugged Sara toward the door. “Let’s go down. You can help with my room. More appropriate you than your dad. It’s women’s stuff.”
* * *
Late that night, after a semblance of order had been restored to the women’s stuff and everyone had left, after Sami had taken the evening bottle that she was on the verge of giving up, and Jill was asleep, and the new bolts on the doors had been thrown, Paige crawled into bed. While she absently tossed a tiny paper ball for kitty to retrieve, she opened another packet of Mara’s letters.
“I love him, I think,” she wrote. Paige looked for a date but could find none. It was pretty old, if Mara was referring to Daniel in the present tense. Daniel had been dead for fourteen years.
It seems I’ve known him so long, and half the time we’re arguing, but there’s a side of him that few people see. He comes across as a guy who’s totally confident, when the opposite is true. He was the youngest in his family and the least able to do things the others did. I identify with him in that, which is maybe why I can understand so much of what he’s feeling. When I tried telling him that once, he got angry. He doesn’t think he’s insecure. So I don’t tell him anymore, but I can see it in everything he does, especially when he’s with me and needs the upper hand.
Poor guy. He tells himself that he’s the kingpin of the practice, when everyone knows that he isn’t. He brought his local contacts to the group, but he has no business sense. He had his office on the opposite side of Tucker—
Tucker?
—
when we arrived. Paige was the one who booked space right next to the hospital, which is where he should have been all along. Paige was the one who put the group together. She was the one who decorated the offices and designed the letterhead and hired Ginny and Dottie
.
Paige set down the letter in astonishment. Mara was talking of
Peter.
She snatched it back up and read on.
She did it purposely, of course. She let him take the credit. Maybe she was being polite, or diplomatic. Or maybe she knew how insecure he was, too. What she didn’t know then, and doesn’t know now, is how hard he fought against that insecurity. He studied his way through school and went into medicine, and he came back to Tucker to hold his head high. I admire him for that—and because he’s a good doctor. He may be arrogant sometimes, but there are other times when he’s that little boy sitting alone in a corner of the schoolyard, steeling himself against the taunts he is sure will come. Those are the times when I melt. Paige tells me I have a thing for the wounded. She should only know the extent of it
.
Paige skimmed the remaining lines of the letter, set it aside, and opened another. Halfway down, she read:
He comes in the middle of the night and never stays long. He says that it wouldn’t be good for the group if the others knew we were involved, and maybe he’s right. Paige and Angie wouldn’t understand the attraction. He can be a pain in the butt sometimes. But they don’t know how good it is with him. In the middle of the night, he’s a clinger. He holds me like he’s afraid someone will come along and snatch me away, and even if he’s doing it in his sleep, I don’t care. It makes me feel good.
Mara and Peter. So it was true. And Paige hadn’t known a thing.
She skimmed that letter, then several more, moving quickly over passages that were blatantly physical. At the next to last letter in the bundle, she slowed.
I shouldn’t be surprised, really. I never could sustain a relationship for any length of time. Something always goes wrong
.
But it wasn’t my fault this time. We were cleaning up after working in his darkroom when I found the pictures buried under a pile. At first I thought they were cut from a book, they were so striking, and then I recognized the model. She graduated from Mount Court two years ago. Peter claims she was of age at the time he took the pictures, and she might have told him that, but he was fooling himself. He could have checked the medical records and found out. She was barely seventeen, posing in the nude in ways that would put him behind bars for years
.
He says it’s art. I say it’s trouble. He says I’m a fine one to talk after giving my husband the pills that killed him, but that wasn’t what happened at all. The problem is that if he tells, I can kiss my career goodbye. So it’s a draw—I don’t tell on him and he doesn’t tell on me
.
Paige folded the letter with unsteady hands. She didn’t want to read more, not that night, at least. She was feeling sick.
That morning Peter had learned about the existence of Mara’s letters. He had suddenly had an allergy meeting that hadn’t been on the books, and while he had been out of the office, someone had searched Paige’s house.
It was too coincidental for comfort.
P
AIGE PHONED PETER EARLY THE NEXT MORNING
and arranged to meet him at the coffee shop around the corner from the hospital. His house would have offered them more privacy, but she wasn’t feeling sure enough of him for that. If the worst-case senario were true and he was guilty of everything she’d imagined in the course of the long night just past, he was a far different person from the one she had thought she knew.
Oh, she knew he was insecure. During their weekly group meetings, he jumped to his own defense more often than the others. Moreover, she had always suspected that his feelings for Mara ran deeper than he let on. Angie had called it a love-hate relationship; Paige agreed.
But the rest—it was hard to accept.
“Hey, Paige,” he called in greeting, looking dapper as always in a tweed blazer and slacks. He winked at the cashier as he strolled past to the table Paige had taken. “What’s up?” He pulled out the chair and sat down.
“Coffee?”
“Sure.” He turned the mug at his place right side up.
Paige poured from the pot the waitress had brought but left her own mug facedown. She was jittery enough without the caffeine.
He added cream and two sugars and took a drink. Satisfied, he took another, then set the mug down. “Problems?”
“I don’t know.” She was trying to gauge his mood, without luck. He was the same nonchalant Vermonter he had been the very first time they had met. Whether the nonchalance was natural or deliberate was the question. “You’re the only one who can tell me that.”
He put his elbows on the table. “Shoot.”
“Mara’s letters? The ones I told you about yesterday?”
“Mmmm?” He took another drink of coffee.
“I was reading more of them last night. There were a bunch that talked about you.”
He set down the mug with a thud. “Does that surprise you? I told you she was hung up on me.”
“These were very specific,” Paige said in a lower voice. “They talked about a love affair. They talked about accusations each of you made against the other, and a stand-off whereby neither of you would tell if the other didn’t”.
He was visibly shaken. “Mara was nuts.”
“She didn’t sound it in the letters,” Paige argued. “They made perfect sense. They implicated you as much as they did her.”
“Implicated me in what? A love-starved woman’s dreams?”
Paige felt suddenly less sympathetic. Mara might indeed have been love-starved, but Peter, in his way, was no less so. “Don’t put her down so quickly,” she cautioned. “She wrote some upsetting things. I can’t just put the letters away and forget about them.”
Peter looked disgusted. “You’re talking about the pictures. She made a goddamned big deal about those. They freaked her out—mostly because they were artistically superior to anything she could produce herself. They were beautiful pictures.”
“She said that.”
“They weren’t pornographic.”
Paige leaned forward. “But she said that your model was underage, and if that’s true, we have a problem.”
“She was eighteen.”
“At the time the pictures were taken?”
“She told me she was eighteen.”
Paige pressed her fingertips to her temple. “The problem,” she said, trying to remain perfectly calm when she wanted to shriek at Peter for being a fool, “is that she might have lied. I haven’t seen these pictures, so I don’t know how they’d be regarded by a jury—”
“A jury! Christ, Paige, this isn’t a legal case. It never was. It’s over and done.”
She raised a hand. “Hear me out. I don’t know where the line lies between art and pornography, but I do know that you’re a pediatrician. You earn your living working with children. You’re in a group practice that devotes itself to them. Do you have any idea what would happen—to you, to
us
—if someone, anyone, were to see those pictures?”
“You’re assuming they’re obscene,” he accused, and started to get up. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
She grabbed his arm. “Please, Peter. This involves all of us. I don’t want to assume anything. That’s why I’m talking with you now. I haven’t said a word to Angie. This is between you and me.
Sit
.”
He gave her a disdainful look but did as she asked.
“Thank you,” she breathed in relief. “This is very difficult for me. It’s one more hit in a whole string of them. All I’m doing is trying to hold things together.”
He cracked his knuckles. “At my expense.”
“No. You’re part of what I want to hold together. I like you, Peter. I always have, and I respect your medical ability. If not, I never would have hung my shingle beside yours in Tucker, much less dragged two of my friends up here.” The responsibility was hers, and an awesome one at that. “Maybe it would have been better for Mara if I hadn’t.”
Peter’s features tightened. “I wasn’t responsible for her death.”
“I didn’t say you were, but apparently she needed something that none of us could give her. The feeling of despair, of total and utter
failure,
that permeates her letters is heartrending. When her father came for the funeral, he said that this wouldn’t’ve happened if she’d stayed home in Eugene.”
“But then she wouldn’t have been a doctor. That was her greatest source of reward.”
“I told him that. Still, there are times when I wonder—” She broke off and chided herself, “Pointless. It’s over and done.” To Peter she said, “But we aren’t. We’re still here, and I want it to stay that way. I like what we have, which is why this is all so upsetting for me.”
Peter pushed his mug around. “There’s no cause for upset. The pictures don’t exist anymore. I destroyed them, negatives and all.”
“But why, if you thought they were art?”
“Because I’m not dumb, Paige. You’re right. We don’t know how a jury would judge them. If they had fallen into the wrong hands, I could have been in deep shit. They weren’t worth it.” He paused. “Aren’t you happy? The condemning evidence is gone. The practice is saved. No one can ever accuse one of the pediatricians of diddling with his patients.”
She studied her hands, not quite sure how to say what needed to be said. Peter could be volatile when threatened, and he was definitely threatened. Gently she said, “The evidence may be gone, but if there’s a problem, it still exists.” She clutched his arm before he could rise. “Don’t blow up. Just answer me. Is this a problem? Was Mara more upset about the photographs or about the fact that you made them? I have to know, Peter. We deal with children. I can’t risk the chance of one of them being hurt.”
“This is an insult,” he said very quietly.
She squeezed his arm. “I’m simply asking.”
“If you knew me, or trusted me, you wouldn’t have to ask.”
“This has nothing to do with trust. It has to do with what turns people on, and that can’t always be controlled.”
Peter drew his arm free. He gripped his mug with both hands, looked her in the eye, and in a low, angry voice said, “I’ll say this once, and once only. I love children because they’re innocent and trusting and inherently good human beings, but I don’t desire them sexually. I desire women. It’s a healthy drive, shared by any healthy males, and while I’m on the subject, let me say one other thing. Legally, I have every right to screw a willing eighteen-year-old female.”
“I know you do, but that’s a technical matter. I can guarantee you—
guarantee
you—that if it came out that you were having an affair with an eighteen-year-old, you’d lose half your practice.”
“You’re right. That’s why I’d never do it.”
“How about breaking into my home,” Paige threw in, thinking that being a thief was more reputable than being a child pornographer and that since he’d defended himself against the last without going bonkers, he could handle the first. “If you thought Mara’s letters would be incriminating, would you try to steal them?”
When he rose from the table, this time she didn’t reach out. “You really don’t trust me, do you?” he asked.
“I want to. But I’ve been racking my brain about who else might have done it, and I can’t think of anyone with motive but you.”
He turned and, slipping a hand in the pocket of his slacks, left the coffee shop without another word.
He didn’t talk with her that day or the next. On the instances when their paths crossed, he was either studying a file or otherwise preoccupied. When Angie commented on his distance, Paige shrugged it off, but she felt like a hypocrite.
Communicate
, she told Angie.
Communicate
, she told the girls at Mount Court.
Communicate
, she told her patient families every day of the week.
So she tried. After several days of silence, she cornered Peter in his office. “I know you’re furious, but if we don’t talk, we can’t resolve anything.”
“There’s nothing to talk about,” he said, regarding her coldly. “You made it clear what you thought. I don’t need a repeat.”
“I didn’t say that you did it. I simply asked.”
“That was enough.”
“But I
had
to ask,” she argued in her own defense. “Look at it from my point of view. Circumstantially speaking, you had opportunity and motive. If it wasn’t you, I need to know who it was.
Someone broke into my house.
It’s not only my safety that’s at stake, it’s Sami’s and Jill’s, too.”
“Sorry. I can’t help you out.” He jotted some notes on the report he’d been writing.
“Peter.” She sighed. “We can’t practice together if we can’t talk.”
“Oh, we can talk.” He tossed his pen aside and sat back. “We can talk about any patient you want. Go ahead. Ask away.”
“Did you love Mara?”
“Mara wasn’t a patient.”
“Did you tell her that she killed Daniel?”
“Daniel,” he said, growing angry again, “was a drug addict. She fell in love with him because he was needy, and married him because she thought that the strength of her love alone would haul him out of the pit he was in. When that didn’t work, she tried pharmaceutical treatment. I can’t say if she killed him. I wasn’t there. But by her own admission, she did give him drugs.”
“She was trying to wean him off them gradually.”
“The guy died of an overdose. That’s a fact. Whether Mara was the one who supplied the pills that did it, or whether the local pusher did is something that a medical board would spend months trying to determine.”
“Did you actually threaten that?” Paige asked. She didn’t believe for a minute that Mara had been responsible for Daniel’s death, but if the suggestion was made, if it came before the medical board, if Mara was found at fault such that she lost her license to practice, it would have killed her as surely as the fumes from her car. Her career meant everything to her.
But Peter wasn’t thinking that way. “You bet I threatened it. She was on her high horse telling me what a medical board would do with
my
prints, so I turned it right around. Mara could be one hell of a bitch.” He pushed a hand through his hair. “Still can. We can’t get rid of her. She keeps hanging on.”
Did she ever, Paige thought. Nothing had been the same since Mara had died. She wondered if things would ever be the same again.
Discouraged, she leaned more heavily against the door. “So. Where do we go from here?”
“I don’t know.”
“We can’t continue this way. The tension is awful.”
“Then we’ll split. You take your patients; Angie will take hers; I’ll take mine.”
“But I don’t want that,” Paige cried. Splitting up was her solution of last resort. “I like your patients as much as I like mine, and I like working in a group. I want things to be like they were before. It was such a
comfortable
life.”
Peter didn’t respond. Nor did he look at her. When he picked up his pen and returned to work, she resignedly let herself out of the office, and when the last of her patients had been seen, she set off for Mount Court.
Practice went well. Paige ran from the demons of the day, pushing herself and the girls farther, faster, than usual. She was therefore more tired than usual when she returned to the car and drove home. She was also more distracted, which was why, in hindsight, she didn’t sense anything amiss until she pulled into her driveway, climbed from the car, and reached across to the passenger’s seat to get the clothes she had worn to work. She cried out in alarm when a face rose from the backseat.
“Sara!”
Sara eyed her somberly.
With a hand to her chest, Paige calmed her breathing. “You scared me half to death. I had no idea you were there. Why didn’t you speak up?”
“If I’d spoken up, you’d have turned around and taken me back.”
“I can still do that,” Paige threatened, but Sara climbed out of the car, crossed the front lawn, and planted herself on the steps.
Paige came to sit beside her. As anxious as she was to see Sami, instinct told her Sara was in greater need at that moment. The girl needed a friend. Paige liked the idea of being one. “Just visiting?”
Sara nodded.
“Does anyone know you’re here?”
“I signed out.”
“For how long?”
“Until ten.”
“Ahhhh.” The evening. Once a sacred time for Paige, now a time for visiting with Sami. And Jill and Sara. Family time, in a make-believe way that was rather nice, as novelties went. “Then you’ll stay for dinner?”
Sara shrugged. “If you want me to.”
“Sure I do. But I have to warn you, I’m on call. If the phone rings, I’m off to the hospital. Did you bring any work to do?”
Sara shook her head.
“No homework?”
“I finished it before practice.”
“Ah. That’s good. I took chicken from the freezer this morning. Sound okay?”
Sara shrugged.
Paige gave her shoulder a squeeze as she went on into the house. She reached out for Sami, who was playing with Jill on the living room rug. “Hello, sweetie. How’s my girl?”
“Gaaaaaaaaaa.”
“What a nice greeting! You’ll be talking up a storm in no time. Jill, this is Sara. She’s from Mount Court.” To Sara she said, “Jill is living in to help me with Sami. She was with friends the other night when you all came.”
